"Consciousness is a being
whose existence posits its essence, and inversely it is consciousness of
a being, whose essence implies its existence; that is, in which appearance
lays claim to being. Being is everywhere...We must understand that this
being is no other than the transphenomenal being of phenomena and not a
noumenal being which is hidden behind them...It requires simply that the
being of that which appears does not exist only in so far as it appears.
The transphenomenal being of what exists for consciousness is itself in
itself.... Consciousness is the revealed-revelation of existents, and existents
appear before consciousness on the foundation of their being...Consciousness
can always pass beyond the existent, not toward its being, but toward the
meaning of this being. A fundamental characteristic of its transcendence
is to transcend the ontic toward the ontological. The meaning of the being
of the existent in so far as it reveals itself to consciousness is the
phenomenon of being...This elucidation of the meaning of being is valid
only for the being of the phenomenon....For being is the being of becoming
and due to this fact it is beyond becoming. It is what it is. This means
that by itself it can not even be what it is not...It is full positivity.
It knows no otherness; it never posits itself as other-than-another-being.
It can support no connection with the other. It is itself indefinitely
and it exhausts itself in being...Consciousness absolutely can not derive
from anything, either from another being, or from a possibility, or from
a necessary law. Uncreated, without reason for being, without any connection
with another being, being-in-itself is de trop for eternity." (Being
and Nothingness, 1943)

About Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre was a French
philosopher and writer, the leading advocate of existentialism during the
years following World World II. The heart of his philosophy was the precious
notion of freedom and its concomitant sense of personal responsibility.
He insisted, in an interview a few years before his death, that he never
ceased to believe that "in the end one is always responsible for what is
made of one," only a slight revision of his earlier, bolder slogan, "man
makes himself." To be sure, as a student of Hegel,
Marx,
Husserl
and Heidegger--and
because of his own physical frailty and the tragedies of the war--Sartre
had to be well aware of the many constraints and obstances to human freedom,
but as a Cartesian, he never deviated from Descartes' classical portrait
of human consciousness as free and distinct from the physical universe
it inhabits. One is never free of one's "situation," Sartre tells us, though
one is always free to deny ("negate") that situation and try to change
it. To be human, to be conscious, is to be free to imagine, free to choose,
and responsible for one's lot in life.

As a student, Sartre
was fascinated by Edmund
Husserl's new philosophical method, phenomenology. His first essays
were direct responses to Husserl and applications of the phenomenological
method. His essay on The
Imagination in 1936 established the groundwork for much of what was
to follow: the celebration of our remarkable freedom to imagine the world
other than it is and (following Kant) the way that this ability informs
all of our experience. In Transcendence
of the Ego (1937) he reconsidered Husserl's central idea of a "phenomenological
reduction" (the idea of examining the essential structures of consciousness
as such) and argued (following Heidegger)
that one cannot examine consciousness without at the same time recognizing
the reality of actual objects in the world. In other words, there can be
no such "reduction." In his novel Nausea
(1938), Sartre made this point in a protracted example: his bored and often
nauseated narrator confronts a gnarled chestnut tree in the park and recognizes
with a visceral shock that its presence is simply given and utterly irreducible.
In The
Transcendence of the Ego Sartre also reconsiders the notion of the
self, which Husserl (and so many earlier philosophers) had identified with
consciousness. But the self, Sartre argues, is not "in" consciousness,
much less identical to it. The self is out there "in the world, like the
self of another." In other words, the self is an ongoing project in the
world with other people; it is not simply self-awareness or self-consciousness
as such ("I think, therefore I am").

This separation of
self and consciousness and the rejection of the self as simply self-consciousness
provide the framework for Sartre's greatest philosophical treatise, Being
and Nothingness (1943). Its structure is unabashedly Cartesian, consciousness
("being-for-itself") on the one side, the existence of mere things ('being-in-itself")
on the other. (The phraseology comes from Hegel).
But Sartre does not fall into the Cartesian trap of designating these two
types of being as separate "substances." Instead, Sartre describes consciousness
as "nothing"--"not a thing" but an activity, "a wind blowing from nowhere
toward the world." Sartre often resorts to visceral metaphors when developing
this theme (e.g., "a worm coiled in the heart of being"), but much of what
he is arguing is familiar to philosophical readers in the more metaphor-free
work of Kant, who also warned against the follies ("paralogisms") of understanding
consciousness as itself a (possible) object of consciousness rather than
as the activity of constituting the objects of consciousness. (As the lens
of the camera can never see itself--and in a mirror only sees a reflection
of itself--consciousness can never view itself as a consciousness and is
only aware of itself--"for itself"--through its experience of objects).
Ontologically, one might think of "nothingness" as "no-thing-ness," a much
less outrageous suggestion than those that would make it an odd sort of
thing.

It is through the nothingness
of consciousness and its activities that negation comes into the world,
our ability to imagine the world other than it is and the inescapable necessity
of imagining ourself other than we seem to be. And because consciousness
is nothingness, it is not subject to the rules of causality. Central to
the argument of Being
and Nothingness and Sartre's insistence on the primacy of human freedom
is his insistence that consciousness cannot be understood in causal terms.
It is always self-determining and, as such, "it always is what it is not,
and is not what it is"--a playful paradox that refers to the fact that
we are always in the process of choosing.

Consciousness is "nothing,"
but the self is always on the way to being something. Throughout our lives
we accumulate a body of facts that are true of us--our "facticity"--but
during our lives we remain free to envision new possibilities to reform
ourself and to reinterpret our facticity in the light of new projects and
ambitions--our "transcendence." This indeterminancy means that we can never
be
anything, and when we try to establish ourselves as something particular--whether
a social role (policeman, waiter) or a certain character (shy, intellectual,
cowardly)--we are in "bad faith." Bad faith is erroneously viewing ourself
as something fixed and settled (Sartre utterly rejects
Freud
and his theory of the unconscious determination of our personalities and
behavior), but it is also bad faith to view oneself as being of infinite
possibilities and ingore the always restrictive facts and circumstances
within which all choice must be made. On the one hand, we are always trying
to define ourself; on the other hand we are always free to break away from
what we are, and always responsible for what we have made of ourselves.
But there is no easy resolution or "balance" between facticity and freedom,
rather a kind of dialectic or tension. The result is our frustrated desire
to be God, to be both in-itself and for-itself. But this is not so much
blasphemy as an expression of despair, a form of ontological original sin,
the impossibility of being both free and what we want to be.

Life for Sartre is
yet more complicateed. There is a third basic ontological category, on
a part with the being-in-itself and being-for-itself and not derivative
of them. He calls it "being-for-others." To say that it is not derivative
is to insist that our knowledge of others is not inferred, e.g., by some
argument by analogy, from the behavior of others, and we ourself are not
wholly constituted by our self-determinations and the facts about us. Sartre
gives us a brutal but familiar everyday example of our experience of being-for-others
in what he calls "the look." Someone catches us "in the act" of doing somethig
humiliating, and we find ourself defining ourself (probably also resisting
that definition) in their terms. In his Saint
Genet (1953), Sartre describes such a conversion of the ten-year-old
Jean Genet into a thief. So, too, we tend to "catch" one another in terms
that are often unflattering. But these judgments become an essential and
ineluctable ingredient in our sense of ourselves, and they too lead to
conflicts--indeed, conflicts so basic and so frustrating that in his play
No
Exit (1943) Sartre has one of his characters utter the famous line,
"Hell is other people."

In his later works,
notably his Critique
of Dialectical Reason (1958-59), Sartre turned increasingly to politics
and, in particular, toward a defense of Marxism
on existentialist principles. This entailed rejecting materialist determinism,
but it also required a new sense of solidarity (or what Sartre had wistfully
called, following Heidegger,
Mitsein
or "being with others"). Thus in his later work he struggled to find a
way of overcoming the conflict and insularity he had described in Being
and Nothingness. Not surprisingly (given his constant political activities)
he found it in revolutionary engagement. Consonant with his rejection of
bourgeois selfhood, Sartre turned down the 1964 Nobel prize for literature.